March 24, 2010

I can hear the june bugs approaching

7

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(Thanks to Kasi for this one.)

I recently dis­cov­ered that gui­tar chords are the same as ukulele chords, which opens up the reper­toire of avail­able songs con­sid­er­ably. It’s a shame that most online sheet music is in the form of gui­tar tabs, which don’t trans­late to the ukulele. Still, I have enough songs to prac­tice that I can switch to another when I get bored with one. I find it inter­est­ing that since the ukulele requires two hands doing dif­fer­ent things, I run into a bot­tle­neck in hand dex­ter­ity; I can pluck or strum well enough with my right hand, but I can’t get the chords with my left hand fast enough, or vice versa depend­ing on the song. I have to prac­tice each hand indi­vid­u­ally, which is so unlike any other instru­ment I’ve played before.

I have a tele­scope now. My instruc­tor was able to get a great pack­age deal for stu­dents in his astropho­tog­ra­phy course for a 114mm reflec­tor, along with a track­ing motor1 and illu­mi­nated retic­ule2. I put it together today, and it was really excit­ing to be assem­bling all these pre­ci­sion parts to make my first tele­scope, a moment I dreamed about since I was a kid. Astronomy is much more com­pli­cated than I expected. Much of it is sim­i­lar to pho­tog­ra­phy in terms of the equip­ment used (although the terms and con­trols are dif­fer­ent), but now you also have to know your sub­ject, your ori­en­ta­tion, and your weather con­di­tions, not to men­tion being at the right place.

I’m feel­ing bet­ter about things. Maybe it’s the promise of warmer weather. I’m wait­ing for the day I can drive my car with the win­dows down and san­dals on. Those are the days of house par­ties, camp­ing, drinks on patios, and first kisses. Soon, it will be the time of stargaz­ing, bar­be­cues, and who knows.

A few peo­ple have sug­gested my depres­sion may have been due to a chem­i­cal imbal­ance, which I never ruled out. Even though it was one e-mail on that Thursday morn­ing that trig­gered all those bad thoughts, I nor­mally would have been able to han­dle it bet­ter. There wasn’t an imme­di­ate impact. Just a grad­ual sag­ging that got worse and worse through­out the day until I was com­pletely dejected at night. After that, I got a blis­ter on my neck from stand­ing in the shower for too long with water that was too hot. Now that I think about it, I com­pletely under­stand why I felt that way, but it seems kind of silly.

Joe Lencioni also rec­om­mended to me a free pro­gram called Flux — appro­pri­ately head­lined as “Software to make your life bet­ter” — that grad­u­ally changes the colour tem­per­a­ture and bright­ness of your mon­i­tors to mimic the set­ting sun. It’s also local­ized, so it knows when the sun sets for your area and changes auto­mat­i­cally. I’m pretty sure it’s made it eas­ier for me to fall asleep at night.

I’m in such a strange phase right now. I don’t know where I am. When I look back on this time in my life, I won­der whether I’ll look back with nos­tal­gia, pity, or regret.

  1. To move the tele­scope at the same rota­tion of the earth to pre­vent blur in astropho­tog­ra­phy. [↑]
  2. To keep track of a guide star in cal­i­brat­ing the track­ing motor. [↑]
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March 12, 2010

Understanding Suicide

13

I gen­er­ally don’t talk about sui­cide. I don’t dis­cuss my bat­tle with any­one, aside from close friends, because it makes most peo­ple uneasy. I never used to under­stand that because it didn’t scare me. Suicide is a choice — a con­scious deci­sion — and a con­scious deci­sion can’t be scary. But more recently, I found myself feel­ing over­whelmed, then afraid I would make a really big mistake.

That fear has kept me alive. Admittedly, I’m still try­ing to under­stand these thoughts in myself.

There have been a few high pro­file sui­cides in the news lately. When mak­ing a state­ment about his son’s death, Walter Koenig said “If you’re one of those peo­ple and you feel you can’t han­dle it any­more, you know, if you can learn any­thing from this, it’s that there’s peo­ple out there who really care.” Then his wife added, “All the peo­ple up here, from the police to his friends, have shown love which he didn’t real­ize was avail­able to him.”

Their words show a very com­mon fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing about the rea­sons some­one has for tak­ing their own life.

You think love can fix us? You think it mat­ters that you care?

The very nature of sui­cide is that a sui­ci­dal per­son doesn’t believe there’s any hope. If we felt like there was some­where to turn, some­one who could help1, that would imply there was hope. And if there was hope, they prob­a­bly wouldn’t com­mit suicide.

We know you care, and we appre­ci­ate it when you tell us. We know how lucky we are to have the friends we do. But none of that helps. Suicide doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily result from a lack of exter­nal love. It can come from a lack of inter­nal love, when we hate our­selves, or because our thoughts or prob­lems seem too dif­fi­cult to bear.

Sometimes I get advice about how to fix the issue, almost always from peo­ple who have never been sui­ci­dal. They think it’s a sim­ple prob­lem, and that we can just stop think­ing about it and it’ll go away. Or we just need to find a hobby to dis­tract us. Or find a pas­sion to give us a rea­son to live. They don’t under­stand that sui­ci­dal thoughts are like a pho­bia — an irra­tional fear. You can’t eas­ily fix irra­tional thoughts. They’re irra­tional because they don’t fol­low logic. Otherwise, you’d be able to cure someone’s arachno­pho­bia sim­ply by explain­ing to them, “Spiders are small and most can’t hurt you”. A per­son with arachno­pho­bia knows that fact, and under­stands it per­fectly, but put a spi­der next to them and they’ll be filled with uncon­trol­lable anxiety.

Relate that back to sui­ci­dal thoughts: try­ing to ratio­nal­ize things to a sui­ci­dal per­son by say­ing, “You have so much to live for”, is just as inef­fec­tive. Someone may have a reward­ing career, a won­der­ful fam­ily, and good health, but none of that per­me­ates the mind when suf­fer­ing from a men­tal issue. The depres­sion is irra­tional, and sui­cide isn’t the easy way out, it becomes the only way out.

From my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence, the worst things you can do when han­dling a sui­ci­dal per­son are:

  • wor­ry­ing or get­ting uncom­fort­able — it puts pres­sure on us and makes us feel worse
  • get­ting angry — it only makes us with­draw more and com­mu­ni­cate less, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion is one of the few out­lets we have left
  • telling them it would be a self­ish deci­sion — when some­one is ready to kill them­selves, they really don’t care and mak­ing them feel guilty is not the answer

The best things you can do for them are:

  • giv­ing them space — we need to han­dle things on our own terms and at our own pace, not yours, and the last thing we want is to feel like we’re incon­ve­nienc­ing you
  • show­ing that you care, not just telling them — ran­dom flow­ers, text mes­sages, hugs, poems (but back off if you’re told that you’re smothering)
  • under­stand­ing that get­ting bet­ter is a long-term process, and not always per­ma­nent — we rely on your patience and under­stand­ing to get through it, and there may be regressions
  • never, never, never turn­ing down a chance to talk or hang out if they ask you — noth­ing makes us sink deeper in our frag­ile states than to feel like we aren’t impor­tant enough (we wouldn’t ask if we didn’t need to)

By no means am I sui­ci­dal right now, but yes­ter­day I con­sid­ered, and came as close to it as I’ve ever been. That was enough to scare me into the real­iza­tion that I need help. Perhaps I’m for­tu­nate enough to say that I under­stand how irra­tional these feel­ings are, and I know that I need to dis­ci­pline, prac­tice, effort, and sys­tem­atic obser­va­tion to fix myself.

  1. Which is very dif­fer­ent from some­one who wants to help. [↑]
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March 12, 2010

The Downward Spiral

8

With Defectiveness, you feel inwardly flawed and defec­tive. You believe that you would be fun­da­men­tally unlov­able to any­one who got close enough to really know you. Your defec­tive­ness would be exposed.

As a child, you did not feel respected for who you were in your fam­ily. Instead, you were crit­i­cized for your “flaws.” You blamed your­self — you felt unwor­thy of love. As an adult, you are afraid of love. You find it dif­fi­cult to believe that peo­ple close to you value you, so you expect rejection.

Depression is some­thing I’ve strug­gled with my whole life. I have so much bag­gage. So many men­tal issues. It makes me won­der, “Who would want to be with me?” I can’t see how any­one would want to deal with it all if they truly knew what goes through my head. The thought of it makes me more depressed, which makes me feel more dam­aged, which makes me more depressed, and every­thing gets worse and worse.

I’m try­ing to break the cycle, but I feel inca­pable of lov­ing myself. It’s so much eas­ier to love other peo­ple. And when I can’t love myself, I can’t see how any­one else could love me either.

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March 11, 2010

Damaged Goods

7

I have to write this so I can admit it to myself.

I have to write this because I can’t think of any­thing else nowa­days, except for how hard it is to get out of bed in the morning.

I’ve been read­ing a book my ther­a­pist rec­om­mended to me a long time ago, the one that deals with life­traps. In one of the first chap­ters, it goes through each life­trap by first explain­ing a “core need”, which is some­thing a child should have in order to thrive. It goes through exam­ples on how we should have been raised, and how a healthy mind will grow from that. Then it explains how the life­trap may develop if that core need isn’t met, by giv­ing exam­ples of destruc­tive child­hood environments.

And for almost every life­trap in the book, I saw my own child­hood in those exam­ples of destruc­tive envi­ron­ments, such as the one about “Self-esteem”:

Self-esteem is the feel­ing that we are worth­while in our per­sonal, social, and work lives. It comes from feel­ing loved and respected as a child in our fam­ily, by friends, and at school.

Ideally we would all have had child­hoods that sup­port our self-esteem. We would have felt loved and appre­ci­ated by our fam­ily, accepted by peers, and suc­cess­ful at school. We would have received praise and encour­age­ment with­out exces­sive crit­i­cism or rejection.

But this may not have hap­pened to you. Perhaps you had a par­ent or sib­ling who con­stantly crit­i­cized you, so that noth­ing you did was accept­able. You felt unlov­able.

As an adult, you may feel inse­cure about cer­tain aspects of your life.

When I was read­ing that, all I could think of was one spe­cific inci­dent from my child­hood. I was young enough that my mom would bathe me, and she would do it in the en suite bath­room of the mas­ter bed­room. One day, she came to dry me off with a towel, and both the bath­room door and the bed­room cur­tains were open. I told her to close the door, because I was self-conscious about being seen naked by the neigh­bours across the street. I was really upset about it, and instead of walk­ing two feet to close the door, she laughed and said, “You’re no Tom Cruise”, and left it open. From that point, I’ve had this irre­press­ible feel­ing that I’m never attrac­tive enough for some­one to even be inter­ested in see­ing me naked.

And that was just one exam­ple. My child­hood was filled with so many such mem­o­ries, each one branch­ing into other lifetraps.

I’ve never won­dered why I have self-esteem issues. I fuck­ing hate how self-conscious I am, because I know the extent of that self-consciousness isn’t nor­mal. I’ve strug­gled with issues like that my entire life, and I can trace every­thing back to my par­ents. It fills me with rage to know that they dam­aged me to the point where I feel so over­whelmed by my flaws that some­times I’d rather be dead.

If I were ever to com­mit sui­cide — and at this point I feel like I can’t rule out the pos­si­bil­ity of this any­more — I’d say that my par­ents would be 55% respon­si­ble1, with my mom shar­ing more of that blame than my dad.

I hope she reads this one day. I hope my entire fam­ily reads this. I hope all my cousin’s moms read this, because they usu­ally try to defend her. I want every­one to know that if I die by my own hand one day, I blame my mom more than any­thing else in the world. I want par­ents to know that they have a respon­si­bil­ity to their kids because they’re peo­ple too, that they have to treat them prop­erly, and that I was an exam­ple of what hap­pens when you don’t.

This is start­ing to sound like a sui­cide note, and it’s scar­ing me. Good thing I’ve always been a ratio­nal per­son, and I still rec­og­nize that sui­cide is an irra­tional deci­sion for me at this moment. Sometimes, I watch sui­cide videos just to shock myself into real­iz­ing how final, irre­versible, and hor­ri­ble that deci­sion is.

I’m at a lot bet­ter than where I was two years ago, before I went to ther­apy, but I’m still far from being fixed. I can admit that to myself now.

  1. The other 45% being my own inabil­ity to deal with these things, but I attribute that to tem­pera­ment, which is inborn and hence not their fault. [↑]
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February 1, 2010

No Motive

0

You know it sucks, real­iz­ing that every­thing you believed in is com­plete bullshit.

—Some guy sit­ting on a bench in some movie

This is how I’ve been feel­ing lately. I’ve lost the plot. I’m wan­der­ing and won­der­ing. Aimless. Floating. Disconnected. Questioning what it’s all for.

It’s not that I haven’t been able to keep myself occu­pied. My cal­en­dar until March is quite busy actu­ally. But I feel like a spec­tre, float­ing through the world; ethe­real, imma­te­r­ial, intan­gi­ble, and unable to be touched or affected by anything.

On the other hand, music is hit­ting me pretty hard right now. I tend to dance a lot, mostly in my room. I actu­ally recorded myself danc­ing to see what it looks like. I can only imag­ine that it’s on the same level of embar­rass­ment as get­ting caught mas­tur­bat­ing to fur­ries (yep, there’s a porn for that) with bean dip smeared on my chest.

I’m in a No Motiv state-of-mind; that strange period between Jacky and Louise, when I was liv­ing on Island Park with Trolley, and we would go for car rides in the sum­mer to Diagram for Healing. But it’s And The Sadness Prevails that I’m redis­cov­er­ing, hear­ing the songs from a dif­fer­ent point in my life very dif­fer­ent from when I last gave the album a thor­ough listen.

When John asks me how my day was, it seems like my answer is always some­where between “shitty” and “like some­one took a giant shit on my face1″. And when he asks what hap­pened, I can never give him a spe­cific inci­dent. It’s just this depres­sion, this sag­ging feel­ing that’s been weigh­ing so heav­ily on me, because I haven’t been able to let go as eas­ily as I’d like.

I’m try­ing to find my foot­ing in the Tao Te Ching. Verse 44 in par­tic­u­lar is speak­ing to me right now:

One’s own rep­u­ta­tion — why the fuss?
One’s own wealth — why the con­cern?
I say, what you gain is more trou­ble than what you lose
Love is the fruit of sac­ri­fice
Wealth is the fruit of gen­eros­ity
Be con­tent, rest in your own full­ness —
You will not suf­fer from loss
You’ll avoid the snare of this world
You’ll have long life and end­less blessings

The tran­si­tion continues.

  1. I should post­script this with a note that I wouldn’t enjoy this [↑]
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August 21, 2009

Where Am I Now?

8

It’s been a par­tic­u­larly try­ing week. I’ve been feel­ing so jaded. Broken. Helpless. Undefined.

Both the cause and the con­se­quence is that I’ve been sleep­ing ter­ri­bly lately. Next week I’m going to try to have a more self-control and stay on a strict sched­ule. Bring some order into my life.

I tried to make an appoint­ment with my ther­a­pist, since I have $300 men­tal health cov­er­age with my work per cal­en­dar year (although this only amounts to two ses­sions). Unfortunately, I need a refer­ral from my fam­ily doc­tor to claim the cov­er­age, because refer­rals are only good for one year, and it’s been that long since I saw him.

I think of how judg­men­tal my dad was when I told him I was see­ing a psy­chol­o­gist. But then I real­ize that he’s prob­a­bly the only per­son I feel like I can really talk to right now (my ther­a­pist, not my dad). I wish I could talk to my friends, but my thoughts are either too embar­rass­ing to admit to them, or too com­pli­cated for them to understand.

I’ve been lis­ten­ing to some quiet, som­bre stuff lately. Trying to acquire a taste for Leonard Cohen’s mid­dle years, when he traded in his gui­tar for horns and vio­lins, even some Depeche Mode. Depeche Fucking Mode. It hasn’t been helping.

I just don’t know what to do with myself lately. But I’m pretty sure I really need to cry right now.

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August 7, 2009

What Do I Know Of Suffering?

4

Sometimes I ques­tion whether or not I really know what suf­fer­ing is. Reading back on my last entry, it struck me that in many ways, my life wasn’t that bad.

A Hero Of Our Time was writ­ten dur­ing great mil­i­tary con­flict, where peo­ple were fre­quently “exiled” by being sent to remote places along the front of the Russian-Circassian War, where Russia had already been fight­ing for over 40 years. Some may argue that I don’t truly under­stand suf­fer­ing, because my cul­ture hasn’t been through some­thing like this, whereas such pain is already in the blood of Russians. Even in pop­u­lar cul­ture, such as Babylon 5, the Russian char­ac­ter Susan Ivanova (whom I quoted in this tweet) seems to fol­low this stereotype.

So can I truly relate to this with­out hav­ing gone through any of it myself?

If you look at Aya Nagatomi’s per­for­mances of Chopin, specif­i­cally her inter­pre­ta­tion of his Étude Op. 10, No. 12, you can tell that it’s tech­ni­cally amaz­ing — cer­tainly a vir­tu­oso in the mak­ing as she’s only 19 in this video — but you don’t feel the rubato with which Chopin intended it. As such, it sounds like it’s being per­formed by a com­puter. You have to won­der whether it takes a cer­tain degree of hard­ship expe­ri­enced to do it jus­tice, per­haps going through the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the November Uprising in Warsaw that inspired Chopin to write this Revolutionary Étude.

Could Leonard Cohen have been able to pen a song like Famous Blue Raincoat with­out hav­ing suf­fered through a few lonely nights in New York City? I think not.

I don’t know enough about Chinese his­tory to know what my ances­tors went through. The rel­a­tives I know of in pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions escaped the Cultural Revolution — where they would have been sub­jected to unbe­liev­able hard­ships — to Hong Kong. Maybe it’s not in my blood, and I’m just drawn to the idea of Nihilism on a super­fi­cial level, never truly under­stand­ing it any deeper.

But a long time ago, I remem­ber read­ing an entry by Tina where she felt dis­turbed by other people’s opin­ions on how jaded she was feel­ing, as they were say­ing she had noth­ing to feel bad about. I told her not to com­pare her­self to oth­ers. That one per­son going through heart­break is a dif­fer­ent kind of suf­fer­ing than a per­son going with­out food, and that one can’t said to be more “painful” than the other.

I may have been well-fed, healthy, and from a middle-class fam­ily in my child­hood. But none of things mat­tered to me because it was the emo­tional con­nec­tion that I was seek­ing, but could never find.

I’ve always had the bad habit of com­par­ing myself to oth­ers. I should prob­a­bly just fol­low my own advice and enjoy the com­fort, beauty, and inspi­ra­tion that Russian lit­er­a­ture gives me.

After all, if I can acknowl­edge that my suf­fer­ing is my own, no one else would truly under­stand anyway!

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April 30, 2009

Protected: Self Medication

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November 18, 2008

Someone To Take Care Of Me

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It’s times like this I wish I had some­one to take care of me1, because I’m tired of tak­ing care of myself.

  1. Pat once told me there should be a per­son in every group who’s always con­trolled, calm, and together (in case of emer­gency, or oth­er­wise), and he tries to be this per­son. It must be true, because he’s my rock, the friend who has never let me down. I once asked him if this idea extended to his mar­riage, and he told me that it applied to 90% of the time. But for the other 10%, when he’s tired, unmo­ti­vated, and doesn’t care any­more, Jenny takes over, and he admit­ted to me that he’s become depen­dent on this. [↑]
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July 17, 2008

Questioning Happiness

9

Last class, Mike asked how I was doing, and as a some­what phatic response, I told him I was doing well.

He told me, with a chuckle, that if he didn’t know me any bet­ter and went only by my writ­ings, he would imag­ine me to be like Joe Btfsplk, with a per­pet­ual rain cloud above my head.

So I went home and read through the last cou­ple pages of my entries, and found that they painted a some­what lugubri­ous picture.

I’ve always con­tended that hap­pi­ness is too hard to write. When I feel like express­ing myself, it’s often because of a prob­lem of some sort, inter­nal or exter­nal, that I need to fig­ure out. Writing has always been a way for me to get my thoughts in line, and off my chest. Not much of a peace­ful, detached, care-free Taoist, am I?

Perhaps I’ll always lead a Cohen-esque life, where love, sex, phi­los­o­phy, and depres­sion are the dom­i­nant themes.

The funny thing is that my life has improved tremen­dously after ther­apy. I used to be a very dark per­son. After gain­ing the sta­bil­ity of a house and a career, along with sep­a­ra­tion from my mother, not much else has changed. I’ve come to real­ize that it’s not so much the things in my life that’s improved in the last few years (aside from the strug­gle with anx­i­ety), as my atti­tude. To be hon­est, I have noth­ing to com­plain about.

That doesn’t change the fact that my entries have been some­what depressing.

Perhaps I’m still not truly happy yet.

Or per­haps I’m still not look­ing at things the right way.

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April 27, 2008

Defining Myself Through Others, Revisited

13

A deeper look at an old topic

Some time when I was a child, I asked my mother if she loved her nails more than she loved me. She had this kit full of nail tools — clip­pers, files made of metal and emery, toe sep­a­ra­tors, fake nails sep­a­rated in lit­tle boxes, even a small hand-held, battery-operated dremel with dif­fer­ent attach­ments used to grind, sand, and pol­ish — that she would carry with her around the house. When I asked her this ques­tion, she picked me up in her arms, and vehe­mently denied it. I didn’t believe her though, not in my heart. She had always paid more atten­tion to her nails than to me.

My dad was no bet­ter. One time I googled his name to find his work num­ber, and came across an audio/visual site where he had writ­ten a small para­graph as a review on a pro­jec­tor he had. I was crushed. It was more effort than he had ever put into my life, sit­ting in a cou­ple of short sen­tences in front of me. It would have been okay if he had been so unin­ter­ested in every­thing, but he wasn’t. He loved his car, he loved his home the­atre, he loved his karaoke, but me he had no inter­est in.

So, before I had become a teenager, I started to look for some kind of approval from other peo­ple. At that point, it was Andrew and Alex. They were my best friends in grade 3 and 4, but I changed schools in grade 5. Even after this, I tried to hang out with them but they seemed to be more inter­ested in school, and we lost touch.

Pretty soon, I real­ized that I wasn’t anyone’s “best friend”. I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt like I needed this to define myself. I needed be a pri­or­ity to some­one because I cer­tainly wasn’t a pri­or­ity to my par­ents. Without being someone’s best friend, I was worthless.

As an adult, you may feel inse­cure about cer­tain aspects of your life. You lack self-confidence in areas where you feel vul­ner­a­ble — inti­mate rela­tion­ships, social sit­u­a­tions, or work. Within your vul­ner­a­ble areas, you feel infe­rior to other peo­ple. You are hyper­sen­si­tive to crit­i­cism or rejection.

I still feel this way now. The prob­lem is that the need isn’t being met. Everyone puts other peo­ple first, and the one foun­da­tion I believed I had in my life has crum­bled. I’m never impor­tant enough.

Two things keep me from killing myself.

The thought that one day, I may mean some­thing to some­one. Or the thought that one day, I’ll be able to stop defin­ing myself through oth­ers, and sim­ply be con­tent with who I am.

Either way, something’s gotta give.

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March 26, 2008

Psychoanalytic Reflections 03

11

My ther­a­pist is on vaca­tion now. When he gets back, I’ll start to see him on a bi-monthly instead of weekly basis. At first he sug­gested that we slow down only once I get a han­dle on my anx­i­ety, but when I explained that the ses­sions were putting me in a neg­a­tive cash-flow sce­nario, he under­stood and agreed1.

  • My depres­sion is gone. Most likely, it was a side effect of my anx­i­ety, or gen­er­al­ized anx­i­ety dis­or­der, which is mostly gone now.
    • The root of this is from my habit of pre­dict­ing neg­a­tive out­comes and ask­ing too many “what ifs”, which I’m still learn­ing to control.
  • There’s this idea of learned help­less­ness that I strug­gle with. The big­ger issue is that when I feel help­less, I get depressed as a result, about things out of my con­trol such as the weather.
    • I love how the prac­ti­cal side of psy­chol­ogy falls in line with Taoism. In this case, I think of verse 29 of the Tao Te Ching:

      Allow your life to unfold nat­u­rally
      Know that it too is a ves­sel of per­fec­tion
      Just as you breathe in and out
      Sometimes you’re ahead and other times behind
      Sometimes you’re strong and other times weak
      Sometimes you’re with peo­ple and other times alone
      To the Sage all of life is a move­ment toward perfection

  • One issue I had a hard time under­stand­ing was my belief that attempt­ing some­thing is a waste of time if I don’t suc­ceed. I sup­pose that it seems rather silly now that I think about it (such as avoid­ing get­ting in a rela­tion­ship just for the fact that one may get hurt), but I spent an entire ses­sion on this sub­ject alone. It’s a prob­lem because I give up on cer­tain things before I try, and lose impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ties as a result.
  • I’m start­ing to become more aware of my auto­matic thought pat­terns. I’d auto­mat­i­cally avoid cer­tain sit­u­a­tions because they would give me anx­i­ety, or pre­dict how other peo­ple would react based on past expe­ri­ences, with­out even real­iz­ing it. This is wrong.
  • I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal about the use­ful­ness of thought records at first, but now that I’ve fin­ished about a half-dozen, I notice a change in my thought process. Every time I get flus­tered, I think in my head of what I’ll write down later (sim­ply because I don’t have time to write it in the moment) and just doing this helps a great deal.
  • My ther­a­pist is a fan of Chappelle’s Show (which is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered to be a low-class and crude form of humour), because it breaks social bar­ri­ers by mak­ing fun of stereo­types, thereby rob­bing them of their sig­nif­i­cance. This makes him the coolest middle-aged white guy ever, and makes me want to smoke a spliff with him.
    • He also calls weed, “grass”, which is cute.
  1. We’re both baf­fled by the fact that the ses­sions aren’t cov­ered by OHIP, whereas phys­i­cal health prob­lems are. [↑]
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February 27, 2008

Psychoanalytic Reflections 02

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My ther­a­pist is still get­ting to know me. Now I have books to read and work­sheets to fill out. It’s some­what strange; I’ve been putting myself through self-help for years, but I’ve never traced it so far back to my child­hood. I don’t like to blame my par­ents because I see how Darren and Pat have sur­vived far “worse” but it’s get­ting more and more obvi­ous that there’s trauma in my child­hood that still affects me to this day.

  • Apparently, I’m mod­er­ately depressed, and “mod­er­ate” is not normal.
  • We’ve fig­ured out that my unassertive­ness is the result of con­flict avoid­ance. Even if I prac­tice a sit­u­a­tion in my head where I say some­thing that may bring up con­flict, I often can’t fol­low through. I feel help­less to fix this, and this leads to a self-defeating attitude.
    • This stems from my child­hood. I’ve almost never argued with my par­ents (there were two times in my life I felt strongly enough to stand up against them, both end­ing in me sub­mit­ting because there was no rea­son­ing with them). I’ve always felt like I wouldn’t be loved unless I got good grades and did every­thing I was told. In other words, it was an extremely con­di­tional love.
    • This means I care about what peo­ple think of me, and I define or eval­u­ate my self-worth through them. Knowing this pisses me off because philo­soph­i­cally and prag­mat­i­cally I don’t agree, but can’t do any­thing about it.
  • Every time I’ve been in ther­apy, I’ve cried at least once. This hap­pens when­ever I bring up spe­cific aspects of my rela­tion­ship with my parents.
  • Hearing my ther­a­pist say, “Wow, that’s bad” brings me a com­fort­ing val­i­da­tion to what I feel.
  • Aside from being slightly ver­bose, my ther­a­pist is great. He’s a non-judgmental, eth­i­cal, open-minded intel­lec­tual. He’s also a good listener.
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February 14, 2008

Psychoanalytic Reflections 01

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It’s a full seven days between ses­sions, and at this point, my pschol­o­gist is just start­ing to know me. In between, I can never stop reflect­ing. I’ve always believed that I know myself well, but these ses­sions are prob­ing ideas and mem­o­ries I haven’t thought of in a while, and open­ing up com­pletely new areas of reflection.

And while I could write for days about these thoughts and epipha­nies, I sim­ply don’t have the time, so I fig­ured I’d briefly touch on them in point form.

  • I need to respect my psy­chol­o­gist in order to accept help from him. i.e. If he was a Freudian and I was a Jungian, I wouldn’t be able to agree with any of his methods.
  • I get very anx­ious when I’m in his office. This is because I don’t like to admit to myself that something’s wrong with me, but when I’m in there, it’s a very tan­gi­ble reminder that I have men­tal problems.
  • I’m very con­flicted on sev­eral issues.
    • I don’t want to lose my emo­tions because I need to suf­fer to cre­ate. Yet the emo­tions are bad enough that I don’t want to have them any­more (or have them in mod­er­a­tion at least).
    • I want to love and be in a rela­tion­ship, and at the same time I cling to being sin­gle because I’m scared of being hurt (in addi­tion to the fact that the free­dom is intox­i­cat­ing). I do this by push­ing oth­ers away from me or cut­ting them off.
      • This stems from two sig­nif­i­cant child­hood mem­o­ries, where I felt betrayed in friend­ship, as well as my rela­tion­ship with my parents.
    • I want to be set­tled and have some sta­bil­ity (in terms of sched­ule, rela­tion­ships, finances etc.), but the strug­gle to be set­tled is what makes me grow and be stronger.
    • Many of these issues can only be resolved from deci­sions I should make. (i.e. No one else can make the deci­sion for me)
    • Turning to Taoism, which is very para­dox­i­cal in itself, has only helped so much.
  • Without my cre­ativ­ity, or my desire to express myself, I’m nothing.
  • I don’t want to “blame” my par­ents for con­fi­dence prob­lems or per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies, but I’m slowly start­ing to find out that they’ve affected me even more than I thought before.
  • As a hedo­nist, my great­est fear is los­ing my joie de vivre. If this hap­pened (and it has once), I would con­sider killing myself. This is because the joys of life bal­ance out all the bad and makes it worth living.
  • I’m depen­dent on other peo­ple for hap­pi­ness. I don’t see my friends often enough for me to be sat­is­fied, and it’s a sim­ple fact of life. They all have sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers, and I’m the only one left sin­gle. I don’t blame them for not spend­ing enough time with me, but it makes me very sad.
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February 8, 2008

Wow.

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A reader sent me this let­ter (posted with her per­mis­sion, of course):

Almost a year after I had man­aged to leave the island behind, the room, the floor, the sheets, the rape — I acci­dently ended up on your blog entry called “The begin­ning to the end” and it changed my world. It awoke feel­ings inside of me that I had for a years time tried to sup­press and scare off so that I never again would open up to any­one, never trust any­one and there­for never end up in the same sit­u­a­tion again. At that time, all men were a poten­tial threath to me.

Reading and watch­ing that very blo­gen­try have had such a great impact on my life and will to become ‘myself’ again, to reclaim my body and to dare to move towards feel­ing and being ‘beau­ti­ful’ again. Your video granted me the sen­sa­tion of how sin­cere, pure and giv­ing love and affec­tion truly are when it’s shared and not forced. It made me remem­ber blocked out feel­ings and sit­u­a­tions and it made me start to long for some­thing that I had com­pletely shut out for over a year.

I have been want­ing to write you this email for quite some time, but I havent been sure of myself or if the “new” me (which is the old in fact) would sur­vive and I didnt want to make this into a sun­shine story if it really wasnt — but after many down­hills, tri­als and tribu­la­tions, the­r­a­phy and social inter­ac­tion, I am there, I am back and I am stand­ing strong again. Nothing will ever be the same, but at least I made the right choice, for me. I have always been lifelov­ing in over­load and even if I am only halfway there yet, it is still enough to keep me going.

I still watch that video every now and then, to remind myself that any­thing is pos­si­ble and that you can recieve “help” from the most unex­pected sources. It used to make me cry, now it makes me smile instead, isnt that beau­ti­ful? I know per­fectly well that you never meant to post that entry for me, but it helped me in one of the most dif­fi­cult times in my life and for that I will be for­ever grate­ful. Thank you.

Yours sin­cerly,
Emma

I’m at a loss for words.

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